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Revolution is very much an overused term in Silicon Valley. But it may be apt to describe the flood of executives in recent years leaving the titans of data storage,
EMC
(ticker: EMC) and
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(NTAP), for start-ups, to push a dramatic overhaul of the industry they helped build.

The money they have consumed along the way certainly feels like wartime spending. Consider the initial-public-offering filing last month by Violin Memory of Mountain View, Calif., which has taken aim at the traditional storage equipment, known as arrays, sold by EMC.

Violin's mission, CEO Don Basile in July explained to me, is to "fundamentally change the economics of enterprise storage." And to take down a giant. "We have one competitor at the end of the day; it's EMC," says Basile.

Violin's revolution doesn't come cheap. Since its founding in 2005, it has consumed $250 million in funding. Despite sales last year of $74 million, it lost $109 million. It has amassed a total deficit as of July of $262 million.

Violin is one of dozens of outfits in the Valley arguing that the disk-array technology is vulnerable to the new machines they're building using flash memory chips, the same kind of chips used to hold songs on an iPod. Flash chips are faster than the spinning magnetic platter in a hard drive, allowing them to dramatically accelerate the retrieval of data.

Flash is also more expensive than disk drives, but Violin and others argue that it is so much more efficient, a customer ends up buying less storage in aggregate. "The interest in all-flash arrays is significant among end users," says Natalya Yezhkova, who follows the market for research firm IDC. "Companies feel even if they need to spend more up front, they will save in the long run by not having to buy these extra drives to get a certain level of performance."

All-flash array sales are minuscule, perhaps $300 million last year out of a total market of $26 billion for what EMC and NetApp traditionally sell. But flash may rise to $1.6 billion by 2016, and that has lured some of the best and brightest of the data-storage world, serial entrepreneurs fleeing good jobs.

Another, Pure Storage, in Mountain View, is staffed with recruits from NetApp. Last month, it scored $150 million in venture money, a record for this segment of tech, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Each has staked out varying positions in the flash war.

Nimble Storage of San Jose, whose founder Varun Mehta's prior start-up was sold to
Google
(GOOG), is using flash only to keep a copy of the most frequently used data, letting disk do the bulk of the work. Using smart software, "we can buy some of the cheapest flash chips out there, the consumer grade," Mehta tells me, "and we can ride down the cost curve of those cheaper components."

A similar approach is taken by Coraid, of Redwood City, Calif. Its arrays combine varying amounts of disk and flash, using Ethernet networking to achieve an optimal mix of the technologies. "There will be a shakeout" among the start-ups, says Coraid CEO Kevin Brown, formerly of NetApp. "There are 30-plus companies just adding flash to a storage array, but flash is not an industry in itself."

The implication is that by next year, some of the me-too companies merely riding the appeal of flash won't be able to stay in the game.

None of these companies has the raw ambition of Violin's Basile. He has big dreams—too big, in fact, for his former post as CEO of another flash upstart,
Fusion-IO
(FIO), which he left in 2009.

When asked about the matter, Basile grumbled something about a difference of perspective; it's all too clear that Fusion's goals were simply too small for him.

Fusion sells a plug-in circuit board that goes into a server computer to accelerate how fast the server pulls data from an array. But Basile wanted to pursue the big kahuna: reinvent the array itself, and strike at the heart of EMC's business.

What makes Violin unique, perhaps, is Basile's contention that flash is just one of many types of memory technology the company will use over time. "We prefer the term memory array instead of flash array," Basile tells me.

VIOLIN IS RANKED NO. 1 in sales of all-flash arrays, according to IDC; it is the poster child for the war. But Basile is acutely aware of EMC's greater resources. "They have at least 100 times more people in the field than we do," he says. "They are one of the greatest technology companies there has ever been."

EMC and NetApp are not standing still. EMC last week rolled out a major overhaul of its VNX line of arrays with a heightened focus on flash, to loud applause from the Street. NetApp is expected to follow suit early next year.

"We believe flash will not disrupt EMC," says UBS analyst Steve Milunovich, "given [that] the company aggressively has embraced this new technology. We think all-flash arrays could dominate the high end of storage, currently epitomized by EMC's VMAX," the top tier of EMC's product line, which combines flash and disk.